Nontoxic children’s balls

Jack with the crocodile creek ball

Jack (16 months old) is obsessed with balls, so much so that “ball” is by far his most used word. I of course wanted to find a natural and nontxic ball for him to play with, so I looked into a bunch of different options.

We have a dog that tries to steal and eventually chew up the balls, so I thought of getting Jack some wool dryer balls that are all natural, but I didn’t because of the dog. These for example are even organic, and I bet they would be great for babies since they are soft. You can even make your own at home apparently.

organic wool balls

These natural rubber balls also looked great, but I was worried that they would be too small so the dog could fit them in his mouth

natural rubber balls

There are also some plush organic balls like these, and I’m sure they would be great for babies.

organic ball

What we ended up deciding on was these rubber balls from Crocodile Creek which are made of natural and synthetic rubber because they are the most natural large non-plush ball I could find. I emailed the manufacturer and they sent me information showing that their balls tested free of any heavy metals. It would be better if they were all natural rubber of course, but this seems to be the best option if you are looking for a large ball that bounces. We’ve taken it outside and Jack had a great time bouncing it around. I especially like the world design because it seems educational! We got the 7 inch one which works well for Jack at 16 months.

crocodile creek ball

The other option we use often is letting Jack play with ball-shaped citrus fruits!

Natural teething solutions

Jack is a little over 6 months now, and I’ve been thinking that he may be teething since around 4 months. At his 4 month visit the pediatrician said his gums were hard so he was likely feeling some teething pain, but it could last for months until a tooth erupts. He also started drooling a lot around 4 months, to the point where I ordered 6 bibs on amazon because he was going through more than a bib per day! We ordered these organic cotton ones because they were so cheap, but the velcro irritated Jack’s neck, so my mom and I replaced it with buttons which work really well now.

Some helpful natural things we’ve tried so far for teething pain are:

• This natural rubber panda. Jack loves kind of scraping it against his gums
• Baby sophie giraffe who is natural rubber (I didn’t want the big sophie because she has a squeaker and some people on amazon said their babies gagged on her legs)
• Any wood toy, block, spoon etc since the hardness of it seems to feel good on his gums
• Wetting the corner of a washcloth and putting it in the freezer so Jack can chew on the cold part (but be careful not to keep the frozen part on his gum for too long)
• Our doctor said he didn’t use Tylenol for his kids, but gave a little chamomile tea. We debated trying Tylenol but I’m glad we didn’t (at least not so far) because Jack has been seeming uncomfortable for a while, so we would have been giving him medicine all the time. I did try about a half ounce of tea which Jack surprisingly liked from a bottle, but there was no noticeable change.

I’m nervous for him to get his first tooth because I can’t imagine how much it would hurt if he bit me while breastfeeding, but I hope when he does that it helps his gum pain go away. Poor guy!